Last winter, as he listened to the roar of German artillery and watched
the sputtering of German incendiaries from the roof of Leningrad's
Conservatory of Music, Fire Warden Shostakovich snapped: "Here the
muses speak together with the guns."

This Sunday afternoon the U.S. will hear the proof of his assertion, but
the proof is already
old: Blood flowed like water and froze
like ice on the steps of Petrograd's Winter Palace. Over bodies and
frozen blood the Red Guards swept through the...